Support Your Candidate!. In my fervor and over-statement to make a point I started making shitty analogies to a religious war. I apologize. That was pretty dumb-ass if you think about current events in the real world. Thanks to Patrick for pointing that out to me. I'm going to switch to a Political based analogies instead. Support your candidate - Sun - in it's bid to control the platform on which you work and play.
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DotNot is more of the same from Microsoft. A stalling tactic. Over promising in order to take control. I think Sun needs to make its own promises (hopefully promises it can deliver on, but whatever. It needs ammunition against M$).
It's time to take back the platform. It's your vote. Choose wisely.
-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]
Sorry Russ, I think you misundestood my comment. The problem is on my side; I don't spend enough time on my blog. I'm kind of too busy with my work to spend time on it.
The usage pattern I have for it is I use it as a kind of glorified bookmark with comments, and then I use the permalinks to refer colleagues and friends to interesting stuff I found. So usually it's completely non polemic. I try to avoid polemics.
To come back to my comment about your religious wars analogy: I should not have commented your post at all, or I should have commented it in more details.
My comment was it was not about the analogy, or not about the analogy alone.
The analogy itself. I don't like the "religious war" analogy, not because of what happens in the world right now, but because of what is hidden behind it, its real meaning: a platform choice would be like a religious belief, it would embeds choices that are in the realm of core values that one chose to believe in, and are not in the scope of things that one discusses or refutes.
Your analogy is used all the time by zealots from one camp or the other.
Why I don't like it is because I don't think a platform choice shares the characteristics of a religious choice. A platform can be questioned, changed if needed. It's just a tool, a mean to an end. And for me, as a developer, the end is to produce programs that satisfy my end users, and when possible, my sense of aesthetics.
The zealots who push for the religious analogy want to force you to chose one platform. I think it is a bad way of looking at the problem.
That's why I don't like the religious analogy.
Now the political analogy is much better. Platforms are not neutral, they are linked to the sociology and politics of the IT ecosystem, and because of IT's imcreased impact on the world, to the whole ecosystem: politics, economy, etc....
And while I agree with your point of view that the java platform is endangered by .NET, I don't quite agree with the means you advocate, fighting FUD with FUD.
Java will survive .NET thanks to:
- a healthy ecosystem of java vendors
- the open source
- evolution: look at what .NET does better than java and imitate it
We have the first 2 aspects right now. We need to work on the third. The java world should not be complacent: .NET copied many things from java and introduced a few great things. Let's just have the platfrom evolve and people won't switch.
This addresses only the technical aspect of this debate, which may not be the primary differentiator in the current fight.
It may be an effect of my tendency to look at things technical with a dispassionate point of view, and I don't say that it is the right answer. This is just mine :-)
BTW: Don't misunderstand me: I subscribed to your RSS feed, I take a great pleasure to read your weblog, and I share many of your views. I just differ in the attitude towards political activism applied to technical platform choices :-)
2:40:48 PM Google It! 
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